The significant surge in this small company's stock was primarily attributable to our Jiangnan Group.
As we have stated numerous times before, Jiangnan Group's foundation rests upon its irreplaceable Black Gold chip. If a second company were capable of producing Black Gold chips, Jiangnan Group's monopoly would be directly shattered.
Consequently, Jiangnan Group's storage chip business, terminal chip business, and its recently emerging smart AI chip projects would all be severely impacted. It's possible that Jiangnan Group's annual output value of hundreds of billions of dollars could be entirely siphoned off by this small company.
Indeed, although this undertaking is highly challenging, given Jiangnan Group's sheer scale, the probability of successfully stealing Jiangnan Group's market share is no higher than 1%. Nevertheless, market imagination is incredibly potent. As long as this possibility exists, even a common sparrow can transform into a phoenix.
Thus, this small company has garnered immense market recognition. A company with a market capitalization of less than $500 million transformed into a large enterprise with a total market value exceeding $50 billion within a week. Although this company's profitability remained unchanged, and it lacked any plans for mass-producing their so-called graphene, this did not hinder the market's boundless optimism.
Throughout this process, Goldman Sachs naturally profited immensely, as it was the major shareholder of this small company, and the vast majority of its circulating shares were also held by Goldman Sachs.
As this small company's valuation soared from $500 million to $50 billion, Goldman Sachs' holdings multiplied a hundredfold. This provided a significant selling point for Goldman Sachs' annual report this year.
The impact did not end there, as Goldman Sachs controlled numerous other companies. Over the subsequent months, every company under Goldman Sachs with any connection to graphene came forward to announce its collaborations with that small company, having secured substantial graphene procurement contracts. They also announced plans to launch new-generation products manufactured using graphene.
What made Goldman Sachs jubilant was that as soon as a company announced its future products would utilize graphene, its stock price would skyrocket, with increases of at least 20% and, in some cases, as high as 30 times.
To any reasonably rational outsider, the stock market seemed to have completely gone mad and become incomprehensible.
However, to seasoned financial professionals, this was merely another wave of hype that inevitably swept through the market every few years.
Typically, every decade at most, a super hotspot emerges in the market, acting as a central heating system.
Anything associated with this hotspot would quickly warm up, leading to stock price surges.
In the first decade of the 21st century in another world, two such hotspots appeared: graphene and 3G networks.
Between 2010 and 2020, three such hotspots emerged. Initially, it was smartphones. Around 2014, the market hotspot shifted to VR devices and gaming.
After 2017, the hotspot abruptly became blockchain technology.
Following 2020, the metaverse rapidly rose to prominence, enjoying immense popularity.
A brief recall of the social news from those times reveals that when these hotspots first emerged, countless individuals would wildly praise them.
For instance, under media hype, graphene was almost portrayed as a miracle material. Whether it was superconductivity, aviation, or microbial nanobots, any problem could be solved with graphene. In essence, graphene was incredibly powerful; anything enhanced with graphene became synonymous with high technology.
To such an extent that even 20 years later, a writer named Wu Liang from Qidian novels desperately leveraged the popularity of graphene, even shamelessly renaming it "Black Gold," attempting to become the world's richest man through graphene.
A closer reflection reveals that almost every new product launched at the time claimed to incorporate graphene as a raw material, as if this would elevate the product to a highly sophisticated and cutting-edge status.
Yet, consumers readily accepted this. Even if products containing graphene were priced at double the cost, a large number of consumers still chose to purchase graphene-related products.
This naturally led to successive surges in graphene concept stocks.
After the graphene wave subsided, with Apple's launch, the 3G network wave began. All companies related to 3G networks experienced repeated surges in their stock prices.
Most comically, one company, simply named 3G and whose main business was selling animal feed, saw its stock price increase by 60% within a week.
Subsequently, this pattern of hotspots was largely replicated. While the initial hype was somewhat justifiable, as graphene, 3G networks, and smartphones were all worthy of the "hotspot" designation, and they indeed possessed the capacity and capital to change the world.
These were not artificially inflated hotspots by capital; there was a high probability they were naturally occurring phenomena.
However, as capital discovered this method of hyping hotspots, to continuously extract funds using this approach, subsequent hotspots became increasingly shameless.
Initially, it was VR gaming. The boom at the time was incredible. Almost all major computer manufacturers announced their entry into the VR field. Some cities in China even declared themselves as VR cities, the center of the global VR industry. Now, those large convention centers and corporate parks remain vacant and overgrown with weeds.
Post-event statistics revealed that only a little over a hundred thousand sets of truly professional VR gaming equipment were sold. Those that claimed millions in sales during promotional campaigns were merely goggle boxes designed to hold mobile phones.
Concurrently, AR devices and technologies suffered from significant user experience issues. Due to screen clarity problems, they caused severe motion sickness among players, and some players even died as a result. Beyond these issues, it's estimated that VR gaming will not become a mainstream gaming genre for at least another forty to fifty years.
Although VR gaming was a rip-off, it still had a future. It could even be said that VR gaming had a high probability of dominating the future. Early investment was not necessarily a bad idea.
However, the subsequent blockchain technology was truly absurd. This technology was not novel; it was essentially akin to BitTorrent downloads. BitTorrent download software like Xunlei and eMule were ubiquitous, yet they did not seem to have changed the world. Well, in enriching the cultural and entertainment lives of teenagers, they certainly made significant contributions.
But as the value of Bitcoin continuously appreciated, blockchain technology directly became popular, leading to the notion of "blockchain technology universality." Anything combined with blockchain technology was destined for success and to become a god-like product.
For a time, companies across the internet began to aggressively publicize their adoption of blockchain technology to enhance their products.
If it were an internet company, then perhaps blockchain technology could indeed improve some product performance. But many food companies, such as a well-known duck feet vendor, suddenly announced that all their products would be linked using blockchain technology, causing great confusion. Could it be that blockchain technology could make duck feet spicier?
Later on, outright scams using blockchain technology began to emerge, with various online currencies proliferating. Initially, these blockchain currencies would at least put on a show for a few days, inflating their value for the first week or two before eventually harvesting all the "leeks" and absconding.
But perhaps due to a lack of "leeks" later on, or perhaps because the "leeks" became smarter, a large number of blockchain companies would announce the launch of a new currency today, solicit players to purchase it on various forums, and then the company would collapse the next day, absconding with hundreds of thousands. Such stories were commonplace. These hotspots had devolved into scythes wielded by capital to harvest "leeks."
Ahem, I've strayed too far.
Let's return to the matter of Black Gold. Compared to the blockchain technology of later generations, this Black Gold technology is still quite reliable, as the example of Jiangnan Group demonstrates.
Therefore, not only ordinary individuals but also a substantial amount of capital intervened, acquiring stocks of related companies. Since the companies that could reach procurement agreements with the small graphene-producing enterprise were all under Goldman Sachs, the stocks of major Goldman Sachs-affiliated companies surged uncontrollably.
Ultimately, according to Goldman Sachs' own statistics, they profited over $30 billion from this small company and at least over $700 billion from other related enterprises.
The entire Goldman Sachs Group collectively celebrated, proclaiming the dawn of a new era.
So, how was Jiangnan Group, the aggrieved party, faring?
It seemed not so bad.
Firstly, Jiangnan Group's stock did not experience a sharp decline because Jiangnan Group was not publicly listed, always remaining wholly owned by Boss Huang.
OO Network, which was related, did see its stock drop somewhat, but not significantly. After all, OO Network's core interest lay in its platform. While graphene technology might threaten this platform in the distant future, it clearly posed no immediate threat, hence OO Network's stock price did not change much.
Did Jiangnan Group's profits suffer?
This remains unknown. Since Jiangnan Group is not publicly listed, no one, except Boss Huang and the tax authorities, knows exactly how much money Jiangnan Group has earned.
However, anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows that Jiangnan Group could not have incurred losses from this. The small company had merely discovered graphene; it had not yet achieved mass production, let alone replaced Black Gold in the market.
This entire process would require at least two to three years. Therefore, Jiangnan Group could not have incurred losses. It's possible that its profits continued to increase this year, as the global number of terminal users grows, and OO Network's surging profits serve as the best testament to this.
This then leads to the question: if Goldman Sachs' affiliated companies surged due to graphene, yet Jiangnan Group itself did not suffer losses, then where did the funds generated by these surges originate?